JordProxa has designed and is currently constructing three crystallisation plants for this site; for nickel sulphate, ammonia sulphate and cobalt sulphate. The production capacity of the battery chemicals plant will be 170,000 tpa of nickel sulphate and 7,400 tpa of cobalt sulphate. This amount of nickel sulphate should prove to be enough to produce around 1 million electric vehicle batteries per year. The cobalt sulphate capacity covers around 300,000 per year.

Perhaps the most important challenge faced was the logistics of coordinating delivery of large components to site and optimising installation in the limited operating window of the short summer season. JordProxa adopted a two-pronged strategy to achieve this. With diameters approaching 10 metres in diameter, the draft tube baffle crystalliser vessels were too large to ship to site in one piece.  These were instead transported to the remote site in segments, late in the Finnish winter.  This allowed final welding to be carried out in the warmer summer months, inside the plant building that our client had erected the previous summer.

The second prong of the strategy was to deliver the balance of plant in modular form, with the advantage of again allowing quick installation and hook up on site.  These modules were designed to be as large as practical, taking into account transportation constraints and materials handling capacity on site. Several were over 20 metres long. Cross section spans were approx 6 metres by 6 metres.